UNDER THE HILL is the timelessly dangerous yet inescapably
compelling world of the alluring Other, in universal folklore, that yet is
always also precisely located in place if not in our time, or any; ANDREW
JORDAN’s remarkable versed prose poem sequence, the 112pp ‘HEGEMONICK’
is in a sense a 21st century take on that theme, at once a curious type of
dark fantasy, fringe SF, explorations and voicings of a damaged central persona
and others equally unattuned to societal “consensual” demands
and, above all, an extraordinary interrogation of an obsessively-drawing,
manipulated-to-destruction landscape, imprisoner of such entities as constructed
essence of martyr pornstar Mary Millington. Setting/persona(s)-entrapper is
Portsdown Hill, ridge n. of Portsmouth, a palimpsest of enigmatic structures
and sites from Neolithic to present, where, though much of its mass of military
establishments from a variety of English wars are derelict, abandoned, or
museumised, some, like those used by the privatised military services entity
Qinetiq, are still enigmatically functional on/in the wounded hill. Through
this fearsomely baffling terrain array, the voices move, conjuring bestial
or lost entities trapped below, harmed or lost children, housing-estate pedophile
hunters, ley line seekers, and those in search of lost futures/selves. Aided
also by detailedly deceptive notes, this complex work is impossible to extract
in a way validly, typically, reflective, though the page 29 lines “Modernity,
the victim in all this— / like a child—abused and demonised, /
or made into an ideal ( . . . ) The true word they hate you for.” does
perhaps begin or end the labyrinthine thread.